One thing I’m always struggling with is the ability to take a perfect loop in tape (one I manually triggered the end-point jusssst right on, making the loop seamless), then adjusting the tempo so my loop / loop markers are perfectly aligned w/ the grid. It seems when I jump to the tempo screen to make minor adjustments, the start of my recorded bar gets nudged off the beat marker. In short, nailing the exact BPM for a nicely formed loop seems like really fidgety, and harder than it has to be.
It seems like it would be such a simple thing for the OS to determine the exact BPM, based on the notion of time divided by # of bars.
Am I missing something? Is this something Beat Match is designed to help with?
"It seems when I jump to the tempo screen to make minor adjustments, the start of my recorded bar gets nudged off the beat marker."
When you adjust the tempo, the bar positions also change. They are linked to the time of the tape, not the beat markers. So once you change the tempo, all of the downbeats shift in time, leaving your loop off beat.
"It seems when I jump to the tempo screen to make minor adjustments, the start of my recorded bar gets nudged off the beat marker."
When you adjust the tempo, the bar positions also change. They are linked to the time of the tape, not the beat markers. So once you change the tempo, all of the downbeats shift in time, leaving your loop off beat.
Yes.
But what’s the secret to getting around that, and what’s the purpose of Beat Match?
According to the manual: "beat match is a concept of keeping the tempo and the tape speed in sync. when beat match is turned on, (turn the green encoder until beat match lights up) the current tempo is locked to the tape speed and dimmed. this means that you now have to adjust the tape speed to change the tempo.
if you turn beat match on and switch to tape mode, you’ll notice that bars have appeared above the tape tracks. these bars are your guidelines when recording in sync. one bar is 16 beats long. now, play a sequence and adjust the tape speed, you will hear the sequence play slower if you turn down the tape speed, and faster if you turn tape speed up. however, the pitch won’t change.
this is the beauty of beat match, to have a drum beat playing using the sequencer and have recorded material played back from tape in sync at the same time. add some tape tricks to that and you have a nice live-tweaking set-up."
Does that do what you are trying to solve? Seems like this would affect the total amount of time you can record if you want to record multiple ideas at different tempos, since now you will have to change tape speed to get a new tempo. If you unlock Beat Match and relock it at a new tempo, then it seems like this would also mess with what you are doing.
Hey @Unflattered ,it seems you are trying to set external loops in time with our OP1s time.For this try sampling with synth and use pitch finetune - shift and tempo- to adjust speed of sample into time with a pre recorded sequence in tape.
Drum sample doesn’t seem to fine tune pitch/speed like this.I’m no expert but this is my conclusion.I may be wrong…beat experts feel free to correct me.
Beat Match is for syncing OP1 sequencer with Tape,so useful for when starting out with loops off OP1 seq inside OP1 and matching to Tape divisions.(Tape speed will also change seq tempo).
Hey @Unflattered ,it seems you are trying to set external loops in time with our OP1s time.
I’d say the opposite. I’m trying to sample into synth, use the pots to nail a perfect loop, record to tape, then set the OP’s tempo to the loop time. I can tap the tempo in, but I’d like something a tad more accurate. In a simple app like Launchpad for iPad, when I import a perfectly trimmed loop, the app calculates the BPM by correlating time / beats. You have to tweak, but it does the math.
Yes that’s what I thought you ment.Seems like its the old school way of having to manually sync a loop to your grid (op1) via shifting the pitch until it locks with a prerecorded seq or metronome,by ear.
You can tap tempo to your loop,but it would still need pitch to match.Try settin tempo ,then pitch you sample before recording to tape.Hope this helps.
i think the reason is because the tempo on the OP1 doesn’t get super precise, when u tap a tempo in, it might be close, but to be exact its probably some long fraction of a BPM, which the OP1 doesn’t pick up. i think it rounds to the nearest something.
the beat match i think works best when u set it from the beginning and then u can set up a 4, 8, or whatever bar loop, use sequencers, play stuff over it, all syncing up and working in time w/ the tape. other than that the only thing beat match really gives u is the ability to snap to bars w/ the tape head, and make perfect x bar loops
it sounds like its not as useful the way you are doing it, making free form loops. if thats working for u and how u like to work just keeping doin it!
It’d be nice if I could lay in the loop to tape, w/ loop markers, then latch the start of the sample to a grid Mark. Then, all you’d have to do is turn adjust tempo until the loop end marker fell onto a grid point. But sadly. You can fine tune tempo w/ shift / blue knob.
It'd be nice if I could lay in the loop to tape, w/ loop markers, then latch the start of the sample to a grid Mark. Then, all you'd have to do is turn adjust tempo until the loop end marker fell onto a grid point. But sadly the start point moves away from the grid, too. Do'able, but tedious. You can fine tune tempo w/ shift / blue knob.
You could do that if you start at the beginning of the tape, correct? That is the one bar marker that never moves. But then again, it kind of limits how you can lay tracks out on the OP-1.
Might be worth trying @Unflattered that method.Lay loop,beatmatch off.Set Green loop- shift&loop.Then beatmatch on and fine tune tempo.
Still require some(or lots of)tweaking.
Yeah… Overall wishful thinking. It’s not crucial to my workflow, so it’s bearable. Would make life nice n’ easy, tho, if u could press a button to automatically change the tempo to match the loop points @ 2 / 4 / 8 bars.
So I think the main issue is that “Beat Match” makes it sound like you should be able to match the beat of a beat that you are working on. Really, it just means that the Beat tempo (of the sequencers and bar markers) is linked to the tape speed. Running without beat match means you can have a perfectly repeating section of music like you want, but the sequencers and bar markers won’t match it. It seems like tap tempo (either in the OP-1 or some other way) is the best way for you to get a matching tempo between the OP-1 and your loop. If you hold the shift key and adjust tempo, you can get more precision, but only up to a tenth of a BPM. Seems like a tedious process, but unfortunately that’s the best that’s available now.